Publications

This important reference book provides standard sampling methods recommended by the American Fisheries Society for assessing and monitoring freshwater fish populations in North America. Methods apply to ponds, reservoirs, natural lakes, and streams and rivers containing cold and warmwater fishes. Range-wide and eco-regional averages for indices of abundance, population structure, and...

Estimation of harvest rates is often a critical component of fishery stock assessment and management. These assessments are often based on catch-at-age data sets generated over many years, but estimates of instantaneous fishing mortality (F) can also be obtained from a shorter-term tag return study. We conducted a 2-year tag return experiment to generate direct estimates of F for...

The sex-age-kill (SAK) model is widely used to estimate abundance of harvested large mammals, including white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus). Despite a long history of use, few formal evaluations of SAK performance exist. We investigated how violations of the stable age distribution and stationary population assumption, changes to male or female harvest, stochastic effects (i.e...

The concept of learning about natural resources through the practice of management has been around for several decades and by now is associated with the term adaptive management. The objectives of this paper are to offer a framework for adaptive management that includes an operational definition, a description of conditions in which it can be usefully applied, and a systematic approach...

Much is known about the importance of the physical characteristics of salmonid habitat in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, with far less known about the food sources and trophic processes within these habitats, and the role they play in regulating salmonid productivity. Freshwater food webs supporting salmonids in Alaska rely heavily on nutrient, detritus and prey subsidies from both...

This chapter describes standard techniques for sampling coldwater fishes in small standing waters. Within the context of this book, coldwater fish species are those that prefer water temperatures less than 15°C, and small standing waters are lakes and reservoirs where surface area is less than 200 ha. Chapter 7 of this book describes sampling coldwater fishes in large standing waters (i...

Large coldwater lakes are defined here as standing freshwater bodies with surface area greater than 200 ha that support coldwater fishes such as trouts and salmons throughout the year. These large water bodies can be exposed to extensive wind fetch, which will affect the timing, mobility, and safety of personnel and gear. These considerations become important constraints for deploying...

Assessing potential future changes in arctic and boreal plant species productivity, ecosystem composition, and canopy complexity is essential for understanding environmental responses under expected altered climate forcing. We examined potential changes in the dominant plant functional types (PFTs) of the sedge tundra, shrub tundra, and boreal forest ecosystems in ecotonal northern...

Refining best management practices (BMPs) for future highway construction depends on a comprehensive understanding of environmental impacts from current construction methods. Based on a before-after-control impact (BACI) experimental design, long-term stream monitoring (1997–2006) was conducted at upstream (as control, n = 3) and downstream (as impact, n = 6) sites in the Lost River...

The genetic basis of susceptibility to chronic wasting disease (CWD) in free-ranging cervids is of great interest. Association studies of disease susceptibility in free-ranging populations, however, face considerable challenges including: the need for large sample sizes when disease is rare, animals of unknown pedigree create a risk of spurious results due to population admixture, and...

Large standing waters are defined as those larger than 200 ha. Water temperature is a major determinant of fish assemblages in large standing water of North America (Matthews 1998 ). From a thermal perspective, eaters are broadly classified into coldwater (inhabited by trout and salmon) and warmwater (intolerable to trout and salmon). Warmwater fish assemblages follow latitudinal and...

Soil temperature and moisture are important factors that control many ecosystem processes. However, interactions between soil thermal and hydrological processes are not adequately understood in cold regions, where the frozen soil, fire disturbance, and soil drainage play important roles in controlling interactions among these processes. These interactions were investigated with a new...